Sue Grand, PhD

Saturdays, Sep. 21 & 28 (2 weeks) 
10:00-12PM (ET) 
On Zoom
4 contact hours = 4 CE credits 

As citizens, we are witnessing a global turn towards neo-fascism. Utilizing a social-historical-psychoanalytic lens, this course queries the allure of these regimes, while attempting to penetrate their deep structure. We will examine the American forms of totalitarianism that have haunted our history, and the ways that these epochs have been erased from that history. This course will suggest that eroticized anxieties about race and gender are foundational to these regimes. The dread of woman; the fear of castration: these reverberate with the loss of white power AND with a lost imaginary of white ‘purity’. In these recurrent epochs, there are themes that we witness today: fear of deviant contagion and blood poisoning by the Other; homoerotic taboos and homoerotic enticement; the idealization of phallic leaders and gravid women; the demonization of female desire and ‘mongrel’ babies’; bodies that are increasingly regulated by the state. In this context, the unregulated body becomes a site of persecution and resistance. Readings will draw on clinical case studies, analytic theory, and political/historical analysis.

4 Contact Hours = 4 CE credits

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify the erotic foundations of fascism.
2. Participants will be able to identify prior epochs of American totalitarianism.
3. Participants will be able to distinguish between regulated and unregulated body forms.

Sue Grand, Ph.D. is faculty and supervisor at the NYU postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis & psychotherapy; faculty at the National Institute for the psychotherapies; faculty, the Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; a visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; and a fellow at the Institute for Psychology and the Other. She is the author of The Reproduction of Evil: a Clinical and Cultural Perspective and The Hero in the Mirror: from Fear to Fortitude. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. She has co-edited books on relational critique and on the trans-generational transmission of trauma. She is the co-author, with Jill Salberg, Trans-generational Transmission: a Contemporary Introduction. She is in private practice.